analysis – Page 15

Art of the Possible

In one of his Google Tech Talks, Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum, uses the term ‘Scrum-but’ to describe companies that incompletely implement the software development framework. When he consults, he’ll hear, “Yeah, we do Scrum, BUT…” and then some reason why they’re not a pure Scrum shop. In my head, they’re showing Sutherland around and at some point, flash-mob-style, folks congregate around the ping-pong table and sing it a la Annie:

It’s a Scrum-but life, for us,
It’s a Scrum-but life, for us,
Our velocity’s not – so – sweet,
But our process can’t – be – beat,
It’s a Scrum-but life!

And this is the reality of it. Here you are, introducing the new ~~kid~~ process on the block, leading the crew with a new philosophy as a ScrumMaster, or in ScrumOfOne land, at times competing with the existing processes or priorities of life. I like how Ken Schwaber, co-founder of Scrum, discusses it in his ‘Agile Project Management with Scrum‘ book:

…the ScrumMaster has to operate within the culture of the organization.

The ScrumMaster walks a fine line between the organization’s need to make changes as quickly as possible and its limited tolerance for change.

…sometimes these changes are culturally unacceptable and the ScrumMaster must acquiesce. Remember that Scrum is the art of the possible. A dead sheepdog is a useless sheepdog.

Back in ScrumOfOne land, the organization’s culture is… us. This can make it stressful, but it doesn’t have to be!

I used to hold my personal and formal 15-minute stand-up meeting at 5:31am. Past tense. My stories are not complex enough to be broken into tasks. I haven’t invested in any Sprint Burndown chart. I don’t have a formal demo for myself. I don’t always go through and clearly describe the acceptance criteria per story. I have tried each of these things, but none have stuck thus far.

So did I beat myself up for sucking at my own ScrumOfOne?

Yes.

I’d create stories to add more rigor to my personal development system, and then implement them. Slowly, through practice, I felt more and more in control. Not all processes would stick, though. And did I bet myself up for continuing to suck?

Yes.

At some point, I stopped feeling like a putz for seemingly setting myself up to fail. At some point, Schwaber’s words sank in with the deeper appreciation of that phrase: Art of the Possible. Via finding solutions that were good enough (better than perfect), and working with myself instead of against myself (tendencies, social pressures, bow tie affinity), I understood that this system is fully mine! I don’t have to be pure Scrummin’ if I am getting stuff done while promoting the principles of transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

So you start scrappy, but you’re getting stuff done, a la Jay-Z.

Do Courage to Gain Confidence

What is life? (Baby, don’t hurt me…)

On David DeAngelo’s ‘On Being A Man’ program, he has a guest, Dr. Paul Dobransky, M.D., where he asks this very question. His very answer is:

Life is irritable.

This response is biological (bad pun alert) in nature (sorry), in that lifeforms will purposefully interact with the environment. The environment does something to the life form, and the life form makes a decision to do something else, versus a rock, in his example, which does anything a rock does, passively. Come to think of it, rocks don’t really do; things are done unto rocks. (How embarrassing: rocks can’t even decide to rock out!) Thus, this answer evolves to:

Life makes decisions.

From here, one could say if one stops making decisions, one is dead. One could also say if one makes lots of decisions, one is more alive. And oh man, are some of those decisions not easy to make, usually because of fear. In these cases, to do what is right, even if you are afraid, requires courage. Leaning into this a little more, if you muster courage to do that thing of which you are afraid, you will gain confidence, regardless of the result. For example, if you hate public speaking, yet you speak publicly and flub epically, you just publicly spoke, and your next public speech will be much easier than the first, as would any other kind of speech, especially private speeches.

Onto the blog post title. First of all, you can’t do courage – that makes no sense. You can do courageous acts, but that just doesn’t sound as cool. So, as per Dr. Paul, to gain confidence, y’gotta do courage, which means you’re making decisions, and truly living, by definition. Let’s massage these ideas a little more.

(Explanatory side note: Once upon a time, there was a final exam for Thermodynamics, the class that gives you practical knowledge like the ability to figure out how much energy is necessary to cook a Thanksgiving turkey. I stayed up all night, studying, which was the wrong thing to do. I should’ve checked my email at 8:30 the night before, like the other kids, to read an email from the TA who felt sorry for us, which shared the focus of the test, which were the areas I studied the least, which I found out 30 minutes before the test. Wonderful. I sat with the exam and went to war, the sheet of equations given to us as weapons, and in my tired stupor, I stared at both sets of dead tree. I proclaimed that there was no choice but for everything to make sense, since it’s just cherry picking the appropriate formulas and mathematically mushing ’em together. That was my most memorable private speech and is my default blogging manner, weaving concepts into evolving themes as I validate ScrumOfOne.)

If you are proactive, then you are making decisions, truly living.
If you are courageous, then you are making hard decisions, truly living and gaining confidence.

In my last post, I commented on how doing something, anything, makes you a better person. I like the much simpler thought track in today’s post: doing something, anything, means you are alive, where the more you do, the more alive you are.

A few months back, I commented on a New York Times interview piece, where “the very act of deciding takes courage, since every action has an opportunity cost“. This expands the association of courage to not just decisions that are difficult due to fear, but to decisions in light of context: you are simultaneously deciding what NOT to do. Now, I don’t think you’d really grow your trove of confidence via decisions that are courageous in this broader sense, but the point of that post was the value of prioritization.

Back-tracking to the better accepted connotation of courage, let’s wrap this puppy up with the following:

Do you want to gain confidence?
Make those hard decisions.
Do courage.

That is life.

To Be A Better Person, Do Anything

A little birdie sent me the following link, thinking this is the type of thing I’d write about:

David Wong‘s End Times Report: 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person, for Cracked.com

Challenge accepted.

This message of tough love was viewed over 8 million times and I’ll talk about it as a whole. Before I do, here are those 6 harsh truths:

#6: The World Only Cares About What It Can Get from You
#5: The Hippies Were Wrong
#4: What You Produce Does Not Have to Make Money, But It Does Have to Benefit People
#3: You Hate Yourself Because You Don’t Do Anything
#2: What You Are Inside Only Matters Because of What It Makes You Do
#1: Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement

He starts it off by talking about markets, covering a point by Chris Guillebeau in ‘The $100 Startup’, where you can follow your inner compass and do what you love, but unless it is of value to somebody, and Chris G. refines this to lessening somebody’s pain or growing somebody’s happiness (he further refines this to not selling what you do, but teaching what you do), you’re only pursuing a hobby. The example given is enjoying pizza. Is somebody going to pay you for eating pizza?

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think I might subscribe to the blog of a pizza afficionado – a one-man Yelp of all things pizza. Heck, think of the detail you could go into…

The secret to the unique texture of the Cooney Island pizza lies in, yes, the water. Its signature flavor peaked in 1954, with hints of cranberry making an appearance if allowed to rest on the tongue, a good year which reflects optimal summer rains, minimal sewage treatment runoffs, and maximal body disposals.

Such gastronomically intriguing critique aside, the point is that there has to be somebody who cares enough for what you’re doing to perceive it as valuable, and valuable enough to trade ya for it, usually with money.

Since stuff like money does help out with living, we acquire this currency via doing things of value for others, usually at a job. Since it’s natural to define ourselves by how we benefit society (how we give value to others), we are defined by our job, and this Wong guy says that actually, you are your job. You can be a nice person, but nobody is paying you to be nice, or at least not as much as they’re paying you to do your job. (And if being nice is your job, then man, I’d love to read your blog; you must be really really REALLY nice…)

So, now that we’ve gotten driven into our heads how humans need things, and how we are defined by our ability to supply a demanded product or service, he approaches our value from an angle I haven’t really seen. The second half of the article talks about inertia and how it relates to our value. See, the only way to be a part of this market of human supply and demand, besides demanding, is supplying: y’gotta do something. I like how he puts it:

Don’t like the prospect of pouring all of that time into a skill? Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the sheer act of practicing will help you come out of your shell — I got through years of tedious office work because I knew that I was learning a unique skill on the side. People quit because it takes too long to see results, because they can’t figure out that the process is the result.

The bad news is that you have no other choice. If you want to work here, close.

And by ‘close’, he means supply a human demand. Create and share. Output.

It’s easy to demand. It’s easy to want. It’s also easy to judge what others supply, what others make. It’s easy to be the critic. It’s harder to make something and suffer through the suckage which comes with the process of perfecting the craft of however you’re making value. This inertia, this… force that pushes back on you, this… laziness, is actually built in – it’s part of your biology, at least as per this Wong guy.

Happiness takes effort, but you can’t get criticized for what you make if you don’t make anything, and this fear aversion (what’s biologically built into us) is comfort. Comfort is easier than happiness, and it’s another form of doing nothing, not participating in the human market, and thus not adding value on this large, mostly blue rock.

So what does this Wong guy recommend to be a better person? Do something. Think it’s what inside that counts? Only if it gets you to do something: share what’s inside with others. Can’t think of something you can share with others? Do something that’s impressive to other people.

And that’s how he ends it. I read that last bit as do something exciting, which I’ve come to understand is happiness.

Challenge completed.

Thank you, little birdie.

Superachievers

When I write a book, it is going to have a short title, like ‘On Raising Polar Bears in Saudi Arabia’. Well, see, even that is too long, and way too interesting (they were very gracious backgammon players).

If you’re Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield, you would write a book entitled The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do And How They Do It So Well, which is, well, yes, quite long, and also quite interesting, at least as per what little I read and saw of the interview on Business Insider.

It sounds a little like my favorite song lyric and second favorite contender for tombstone epitaph. Ladies and gentlemen, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band:

It’s not what you look like,
When you’re doin’ what you’re doin’.
It’s what you’re doin’ when you’re doin’,
What you look like you’re doin’.
Express yourself.

Dubbed ‘the most successful and productive people’, here are the highlights:

Grow from failure. They meet it not with blame, but with self-awareness and introspection, which lead to reinventing themselves.
Commit to dreams. They wrap their lives around their inspiration, with everything in the service of this end.
Channel negative emotions. They might get knocked back, but they keep their eye on the prize.
Go for broke. They forgo fearing failure.

What I take away from that is a two-part Art of Doing:

Have a vision and a burning desire to wholly lead your life per your personal inspiration.
Know that life will give you lemons and that they won’t stop you.

Tying back to the ScrumOfOne system I hold so dearly, #1 relates to the Product Owner and #2 relates to the ScrumMaster. The Product Owner sets the direction: vision and strategy. The ScrumMaster guides the team through the Scrum process, which includes the Retrospective, which in itself covers that first ‘Grow from failure’ highlight above. At the end of your Sprint, you take a look at anything that may not have gone as planned, ultimately adapting – reinventing yourself.

To me, that last highlight is tricky, ‘Go for broke’. When you’ve got your eye on the prize because you are unabashedly immersed in living your dream, I’m guessing ‘failure’, or fear of it, doesn’t register / exist in that frame. If you run into a wall, you pause, regroup, pivot, and continue trail blazing. That sounds like a major change in mindset for most folks who fear failure in pursuing their dream. Now I want to see if the book has more on this topic.

Take a page from the Internet’s favorite OTT bad-ass. When life gives Chuck Norris lemons, he makes orange juice.

Frustration

Once upon a time, I was frustrated.

This was, like, yesterday.

I just didn’t like how things were going, to the point where I got home, plopped myself on the couch, and sat there, staring at a candelabra that had way more color than the state of my soul. Things weren’t going my way.

Ha. Now that I’ve typed that, I realize that is a very accurate phrase to describe my mood all those day ago.

Things weren’t going my way.

Thus, I ruminated on this thought, chewing through the fat of gloomy cud, regurgitating thoughts that led to:

Oh, those dang things! It’s their bloody fault! They weren’t doing what I wanted them to do! Grrr!!!

Once I realized how I was thinking about these things, I bit my tongue; I chewed through my frustration. The insight was recognizing my passivity. The solution is being a ‘Man (/Woman) of Action’.

Granted, there is some solid good that comes from working through grief and not just sweeping undeniable emotions under the rug (you’ll just trip over them later). So once I did that, by sitting and doing nothing useful because I felt like the accomplished equivalent of a gastronomical intermediate by-product, I figured I should make a plan of action, and follow through, based on a set of values I find important – y’know, taking action.

Oh, that’s right. I already did that. I have one of those. It’s called my ScrumOfOne personal Sprint backlog, built off of my larger backlog(s) of things I want to do and be, prioritized by what I find important.

Stick with the plan. Tweak every couple of weeks. My plan.

Phew. That was a lot to go through since, like, yesterday.